An Insider’s Account of Manolo Blahnik

“I was in charge of New Man jeans,” said Mr. Blahnik, nattily attired in a bespoke vanilla linen suit, sky blue and white striped knit tie, and saddle shoes. “They had jeans in the most beautiful acid green denim. I bought them.”

Mr. Roberts, 69, who was dressed in a faded navy raincoat, blue plaid Gap pajama pants, and saddle shoes, said, “And I bought them in orange.”

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Manolo Blahnik became a household name in the 1990s thanks to the TV show “Sex and the City.”Credit Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times

“Chelsea,” Mr. Roberts said. “Lemon yellow crepe de Chine tunics, with cord belts. And we were walking around the back streets of Chelsea, trying to get a cab. And of course, no one would stop, because I was wearing the tunic, and my hair was dyed shocking pink, and I had no eyebrows.”

“That’s right!” Mr. Blahnik said. “You didn’t have eyebrows at all. How awful that was. It was horrific.”

“It wasn’t horrific.”

“It was horrific, Michael,” Mr. Blahnik said. “You looked like you were in Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis.’”

When Mr. Blahnik started making shoes (the idea came from Diana Vreeland, then the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute), the fashion editor Grace Coddington became a fan, and, he said, she put him in British Vogue “all the time, with pictures by Norman Parkinson and the model Apollonia.”

“That was a major moment for you,” Mr. Roberts said. “The things you were doing back then. Bottines — nobody was doing bottines. And mules.”

“We still do mules.”

By the 1990s Mr. Blahnik had become a household name in the United States thanks to the TV show “Sex and the City,” whose Carrie Bradshaw character (Sarah Jessica Parker) wore “Manolos” religiously. Mr. Roberts at the time was the first fashion director of The New Yorker, where one of his jobs was working with the notoriously picky photographer Irving Penn.

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Details inside the Manolo Blahnik headquarters.Credit Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times

“Every week I would meet with Mr. Penn down at the studio and present him with a list of potential people we would like him to photograph,” Mr. Roberts said. “And he’d say, ‘No, no, my dear boy. No, no, no. And then, in 2003, he said yes to Manolo.”

During the shoot in New York, Mr. Penn told Mr. Blahnik: “‘Now, hold something. Do you have some kind of jewel? No! I need a heel!’”

“So we ran to the office, and we got two heels,” Mr. Blahnik said. “And he said, ‘That one.’ Then he said, ‘Think about something.’ So I thought about Santa Teresa” — the 16th-century Spanish Carmelite nun — “and her memoirs. And he said, ‘Yes! Get yourself possessed by Santa Teresa! And now, hold the heel!’ And he took the picture.”

After leaving The New Yorker in 2006, Mr. Roberts made, among many other projects, a series of short films for and about Mr. Blahnik. The first, “Jealousy,” was a stormy tango-themed love story inspired by one of Mr. Blahnik’s shoe collections, starring their longtime friends the photographer Lucy Birley and the actor Rupert Everett, and shown on YouTube.

Sometime later Mr. Roberts produced several Super 8-style black-and-white movies about his friend’s childhood in the Canary Islands, with a boy in a crisp white shirt, dark knit vest and lederhosen scampering around a formal garden, playing with lizards and fashioning shoes for them out of the foil wrappers of Cadbury chocolate bars.

So pleased with how they turned out, Mr. Roberts thought: Why don’t we do a film of Manolo’s life? He proposed the idea, and Mr. Blahnik agreed.

Initially, the movie’s production went seamlessly. Mr. Roberts filmed Mr. Blahnik’s shoes as still lifes in flower beds and on swaths of silk, and he interviewed famous customers and friends including Rihanna and Paloma Picasso. To illustrate Mr. Blahnik’s inspirations, he dressed up Ms. Birley and the Chanel creative consultant Amanda Harlech as Victorian chatelaines and captured them strolling across the fields of a British estate.

“It was the day of a hurricane, with 100-mile-an-hour winds,” Mr. Roberts said.

“It was lovely, actually,” Mr. Blahnik said.

“It was perfect,” Mr. Roberts said.

Then, Mr. Roberts recalled, it came time to sit down with the star, and “Manolo said: ‘I don’t want to be in it.’”

“I didn’t, actually,” Mr. Blahnik said.

“So that caused a bit of a hiccup,” Mr. Roberts said.

“You know, his days of being very, very, very gregarious are done,” Mr. Roberts said.

“It’s true,” Mr. Blahnik said.

“He doesn’t do red carpets or anything like that anymore. He stays at home,” Mr. Roberts said. “All the people on the film were desperate to get him involved — he was like this myth, and they wanted to see him, to know what he’s about. So I wasn’t only the director, I was the diplomat, and the handler. So many roles that one had to play to get this film done.”

Mr. Blahnik said, “I changed my mind when ——”

“When you saw the little boy playing with the lizards. You said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so like how it was.’”

Not only did Mr. Blahnik change his mind and their friendship survive, but also the process of finishing the documentary has started something else.